The Gadget Tree

Within the next two weeks the Haiku Project will finally be releasing it's first alpha version. What is Haiku you ask? Well to answer that we'd have to step back a little further, say to 1998.

Follow up:

This was the year that Be Inc. ported their BeOS (the Be Operating System) over to Intel architecture. If you were lucky enough to have been at or around this time you might remember trying out the BeOS. Marveling at what was in effect a better version of the Mac operating system, but it ran on run of the mill PCs! It was fast, stable, and had a friendly interface. Having already tried many Linux distros of the day I remember thinking that BeOS was the only "alternative" OS I had yet tried that was even remotely elegant. In actuality it was far more elegant than the Windows of Mac OS versions of the time.

The similarity to Mac OS was not by accident. Jean-Louis Gassée, the founder of Be Inc. was a former Apple employee and several Apple team members left with him when he started up his new company. In fact there was a time when BeOS was nearly purchased by Apple to become the basis of it's next generation OS (OS X). Upon Steve Jobs' return to the company, however, the plan was scrapped and instead Apple purchased NeXT Software Inc (also founded by Jobs). Their NeXTStep became part of the basis for OS X. This left Be Inc. without any major supporters except for their enthusiastic fanbase. With their stock sinking Be Inc. decided in 2001 to sell out to Palm and thus BeOS was consigned to the history books. It was far ahead of its time and in my opinion is still the most elegant OS I've used to date.

Determined not to let BeOS fade into history completely the Haiku Project was started in 2001. On April 2, 2008 it was announced that Haiku was now self hosting (meaning that it can now be built from within itself). Now here we are, 8 years after the project began and the alpha release is only days away. Recently I've tried some of the pre-alpha builds and I must say that in my opinion it already feels like a much more polished product than most Linux distributions do. I just hope that by the time the beta is released it's suitable for everyday use, as I may have to format a couple of my computers and say "Bye-Bye" to Windows, Linux, and OSX.

What will make you want to try the Haiku alpha? Nothing that I can say will help. It's just like those Amiga users that rave about their systems, you can't really explain it, you just feel comfortable with it. The BeOS made computing personal, warm, friendly....that's the only way I can describe it. So if you're adventurous check out the link below. The alpha should be released some time between the 15th and 20th.

The Haiku Project